


Some Kinda Love

by MissdeVine



Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith, Strike (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Memories, Oxford
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-21 01:33:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30014070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissdeVine/pseuds/MissdeVine
Summary: Sometimes you have to go back to move on.A consultation with a client in Oxford becomes an opportunity to revisit and rethink the past.
Relationships: Robin Ellacott/Cormoran Strike
Comments: 67
Kudos: 69





	1. Chapter 1

_Some kinda love_ _  
Margarita told Tom  
Between thought and expression  
Lies a lifetime_

( _Some Kinda Love_ , The Velvet Underground)

Oxford

Thursday, 9th April, 2015

_And some kinds of love  
Are mistaken for vision_

‘Meet you in Oxford?’ repeated Robin, flatly.

Strike was holding the phone closely to his ear to drown out the group of voluble teenagers streaming past him as he stood in the last of the day’s light on the Woodstock Road. Robin sounded uncharacteristically distant, and he wondered if she resented him ringing her while she was having a week off in Masham. Although it had cost him some effort, he had deliberately not been in touch in order to give her a break from the agency. When he had realised that he really did need to talk to her, he had dialled her number straightaway.

‘I know it’s not exactly on your way home tomorrow,’ Strike said, not wanting to sound as if he were trying to persuade her. ‘It’s just that I’ve had the initial meeting with this client in Oxford today, and he’s a bit nervy about you posing as his girlfriend at the anniversary party next week. He seems to doubt that you can pull it off if you won’t get to meet him until the day before. Wants to talk you through this whole thing with his cousin, make sure you understand the ‘family dynamics’.’

Privately, Strike wondered if Tom Reed-Smith was sceptical that the agency would have an employee capable of passing muster as a prospective partner with his class-conscious parents. Either that, or he wanted to be sure that Robin was as attractive in person as she had been in the photo Strike had sent him to secure the job.

Strike’s assurances, delivered with a trace of irony at the thought that Robin might be incapable of playing a London-based human resources manager with a penchant for rugby-playing accountants, had failed to convince his potential client. Instead, Tom, whom Strike had already mentally named The Bore, had insisted that he meet her in person before signing the contract.

‘Look, I know you can do this job standing on your head,’ he went on, as he walked back towards the centre of the city. ‘But if you drive via Oxford on your way back tomorrow, we could have a quick meeting with him, let him get us up to speed’ - and check you out, he thought to himself sourly - ‘and then you take the rest of your Friday off. I wouldn’t ask,’ he added, ‘but he didn’t even blink when I doubled our hourly rate. I thought it would put him off, but it didn’t. And we could use the money for the office move.’

Robin had been silent while he talked. ‘That’s fine,’ she said slowly, at last. ‘I’ll aim to get there for 11am. Text me where to meet.’

As he ended the call and lit a cigarette, Strike’s eye was caught by the blue and bronze sign of the Eagle and Child hanging thirty feet away. It was not a pub he had frequented when he had been studying in Oxford some twenty years ago, and thus it was unlikely to bring back unwanted memories if he refreshed himself there with a pint before finding the bus back to the Park and Ride.

Strike had been very definite in his decision to take the car and drive from London to Oxford. He knew without having to articulate it to himself that he did not want to relive those earlier arrivals into the city by train: excited and light-hearted, backpack on shoulders already broadening into adulthood, and hands full of necessities for student life. Now, finding himself walking unsettlingly familiar streets with an empty evening ahead, and torn between a craving for a fag after the meeting with the client and his need for a beer, he compromised with a few quick drags and then pushed on the black door.

The pub was cosy and warm after the chill of an early April evening, and Strike, eager to rest his leg, quickly achieved both a pint and a table in the corner, and mentally ran through the next twenty-four hours. If he found a cheap hotel not far from where he was parked, he could meet Robin there in the morning, and they could take the bus back in to central Oxford. He would introduce her to the client, let them plan the job and get the contract signed.

He remembered the eager look with which Reed-Smith had earlier brought up the photograph of Robin on his phone and asked to talk to her in person. Strike had every intention of remaining at that meeting as a large and surly presence, and then of making a quick getaway from the city in which he had lived so briefly but which had formed some of his most potent memories.

Strike rarely had had cause to return to Oxford after his truncated academic career. After Whittaker was acquitted, he had within a day applied to join the army, informed his tutor, and packed his bags to the soundtrack of Charlotte’s incredulous fury: ‘God, Bluey – a fucking squaddie?! Can’t you at least join the bloody Guards?’. He wasted no time on farewells to a place of which he had become fond, but in which he had passed a life he now found pointless, even incomprehensible.

Extended goodbyes were not, in any case, his habit. His peripatetic childhood, with its abrupt departures, had prepared him for the rapid plunge into a military life far removed from his intense yet frivolous student existence. During his early weeks in the army he had wondered, in the very few moments he had free from drills and inspections, if Oxford, with its golden stone quadrangles and immaculate lawns, its tourist-ridden streets and restfully silent libraries, had actually existed apart from his imagination.

Now his mind wandered further back, from the end of his time here to the beginning. Ted and Joan had offered to come to London and drive him to Oxford, but Strike, independent and used to travelling light, had preferred to take the train. On the morning of his departure from the squat in Fulbourne Street, he had ignored a sneering Whittaker, and bade farewell to Leda, wryly accepting the small bag of weed she had lovingly pressed into his hand – ‘to make friends with, darling’ – before palming it off to Shanker when her back was turned. Hoisting up his backpack, he had walked through Whitechapel with a liberating feeling of endless possibility.

The first weeks of the Michaelmas Term were drinking games in the college bar, impromptu gatherings in student rooms, and noisy dinners in the buttery. He had tentatively pushed open the doors into the studious hush of his college library, which smelled of floor wax and musty paper, to look along orderly shelves for the books on his reading lists. He had learned to stride confidently through the Porters’ Lodge, enjoying the quiet and permanence of the tidy stone quadrangles and cloisters. He had put on a new and ill-fitting suit and his commoner’s gown to go in to formal hall with the other freshers. Their delight at achieving an entrée to a world of academic excellence was poorly concealed under a sophisticated facade. In private, they were terrified that by opening their mouths in their first tutorial they would reveal that an awful mistake had been made in offering them a place among the dreaming spires.

Strike quickly felt a loyalty to his college that was not tempered by the pedantic and sometimes baffling college rules. He cultivated the porters with friendly chat, and his fellow students with humour and subtle adaptation to each of their different tribes. His tutor was eccentric but warm, and college food, while uninspiring, was at least regular, mostly nutritious and cooked for him.

Most of all he loved his attic room, on the third floor of an out-of-the-way staircase. It was over-heated, and filled with unloved furniture and a narrow single bed which hardly held his bulk, but it was his, and his alone, and he kept it immaculately tidy with the attention and relief of one who has after turbulent seas come into safe harbour. At the bottom of the staircase, hand-painted on a board next to his room number and a sliding panel that informed any casual visitor if he were in or out, was his name: C.B. Strike.

The Eagle and Child was still quite empty. He got up and ordered another pint, and while the barman drew it, he listened to the music playing. ‘Put jelly on your shoulder, baby/Lie down upon the carpet,’ sang a voice with the eccentric emphasis of someone who has taken an awful lot of drugs. It was the Velvet Underground, who had been a favourite not only of his mother but of the quiet, almost skeletally thin, engineering student in the other room at the top of the staircase, whose name Strike could no longer remember. Charlotte had nicknamed the student Twiglet, and had ignored him completely whenever they happened to meet on the landing. Mostly, she and Strike had spent their time in her room, more conveniently located nearer the bar, and with a marginally wider bed.

It was only at the point of remembering their many and varied couplings that Strike baulked. Shifting position and downing half his drink did not, however, reset his thoughts, and he proceeded with the wincing tentativeness of a patient lifting the bandage on a serious wound.

He thought back to the party at which he had met her, and the thrilling turbulence that had followed. Attracted by her astounding beauty, and by the way she both flagrantly flouted and clung firmly to social convention as was most useful to her, Strike found himself relishing the drama Charlotte provided. If the calm and regulated institutional life of the ancient university was a balm to him after years of chaotic living, her presence warded off the conformity Lucy so craved but which he feared as if it were death itself. Both in public and in bed she gave him that rush of adrenaline which had apparently become necessary to him.

It was the aftermath of those nights with Charlotte that was now most painful. In those first months they had lain awake, nose to nose, eyes gleaming, voices low, and he had told her of his past and his ambitions with an intimacy he had never again shared with anyone else, or even, in the latter stages of their relationship, with her. Practised at holding his cards close to his chest, he thought he had at last found an empathetic listener despite Charlotte’s barbed wit; she was, after all, no stranger to the madness of family turmoil.

It was only sometime later that he discovered he had handed her of his own accord powerful weapons with which to assault him whenever he displeased her. During those dimly lit disclosures in the small hours, the strength of their mutual bond had given him an almost visionary certainty; by the time daylight had illuminated her vengefulness and her desire to provoke scenes out of the sheer boredom of living with herself, he had found himself tied to her by need and by habit.

Brought back to the present by the entrance of a large party of what looked like graduate students, Strike went to empty his bladder in preparation for the walk through the dark and emptying streets to the bus stop. Outside, the temperature had dropped further and the orange streetlights were haloed by a faint mist.

He passed the high stone walls of Balliol, and remembered visiting a friend there in their first Trinity term. Someone, heedless of the preferences of the rest of the college, had been playing Tom Petty’s _Free Fallin’_ at full volume around the Front Quadrangle from a ghetto blaster perched in a second-floor window. Along Cornmarket Street he saw a man coming towards him wearing black tie and he thought of the twenty-first birthday party of an obnoxious acquaintance of Charlotte’s at Christ Church, who stipulated that his guests should wear 1920s evening dress in homage to Brideshead Revisited. A sequin-clad Charlotte had taken a sly and malicious delight in arriving at the party with Strike dressed in plebian jeans and a t-shirt.

Wankers, the lot of them, he thought, as he strode down to St Aldate’s, stopping only to cup large hands around one last cigarette and then close the lighter with a dismissive shake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, the Brideshead Revisited 21st party was a real thing. Honest.
> 
> This is all about Strike but we'll see more of Robin soon. And it eventually gets more talk-y.
> 
> Also, this is my first time posting here and I don't know how to do chapters yet, but I think there are going to be 5 of them.


	2. Chapter 2

Friday 10th April, 2015

_Situations arise  
Because of the weather_

Robin had dressed for April in Yorkshire, where a brisk breeze had been threatening the upright stance of the daffodils lining the lane to her parents’ house. Now, sitting on the bus into the centre of Oxford, she could feel her face flushing with the heat of too many layers. She stood up to remove her coat and scarf, revealing a white shirt patterned with daisies and a navy cardigan, and caught Strike’s eye as she sat down again.

They had met in the hotel car park as planned, and seeing his bulky figure leaning against the BMW had given her a shot of joy, but beyond a brief enquiry about her drive down, and a short update on their client, he had said little. She gathered he had found a bed for the night, and a waft of minty breath and a clean-looking shirt argued that he had taken up her suggestion of keeping an overnight bag in his car. He certainly showed little of the enthusiasm at her arrival that she might have expected after yesterday’s phone call.

She wondered how he had passed the evening, if he had walked around former haunts in a haze of nostalgia, but she did not want to ask. Oxford was where Strike had met Charlotte, and she feared any reminiscence about the early days of their relationship; or worse and much more likely, that he would shut down any polite enquiry and leave her pondering if Charlotte had indeed been filling his thoughts. In the months since her thirtieth birthday he had become more comfortable talking about his life, and she had felt able to ask him questions about Cornwall, and the army, and even about his childhood. But although Strike did not shy away from mentioning Charlotte’s name in the course of an anecdote, he gave no indication of how he might feel about her in the present, and it was this that Robin most wanted to know. She felt her chest clench at the thought that he might have spent his evening revisiting memories, taken back in time to some soft-focused idyll of young love.

She herself had slept poorly in her childhood bedroom; wide awake by 5am, she had been on the road by half past, and with a brief stop for petrol and a croissant, she had made it to Strike’s hotel early. All the way down the M1, she had battled an uneasiness about her destination. Strike could not have known how she felt about Oxford, about her own conflicted experiences of the city, when he had asked her to change her plans. Although it would not stop her doing her job, a long-suppressed discomfort had resurfaced and she did not anticipate the visit with much pleasure.

The brakes hissed loudly as the bus pulled into a stop, and they stood up, ready to get off. Outside the grey day was beginning to brighten, and Robin started after Strike along the already crowded pavements.

‘So what’s Tom Reed-Smith done to be called The Bore?’ she asked when she had caught up with him. He looked down at her red-gold head, and thought of how he had had to conceal his sudden pleasure at seeing her when she got out of the Land Rover that morning. Her uncomplicated smile when she caught sight of him had refreshed him after a night spent trying to escape memories of a taunting dark-haired beauty. He had surprised himself by wanting to envelop her in a hug after a week apart but instead he had simply passed her a tea in a cardboard cup, and told her about the client and his requirements in a tone which made Robin conclude Strike thought little of him.

‘Well, he’s a bloody accountant, and he told me in great detail about the rugby match he played last Sunday,’ Strike said now. ‘I think that’s enough, don’t you?’.

Robin, who had much experience of listening to play-by-play accounts of sporting fixtures, opened her mouth, but Strike cut her off. ‘And don’t say I do that when Arsenal plays, because that’s different. That’s football.’

They walked through the mixture of austere beauty and crass commercialism that marked the city centre to the Randolph Hotel, and made their way up the stone steps and into the panelled lobby. The Morse Bar was panelled too, with a large stone fireplace, red leather chairs and the sort of violently patterned carpet found only in ungentrified pubs and large provincial hotels. Just inside, Reed-Smith was waiting for them, a courtesy Strike hadn’t expected. There were introductions, and handshakes, and Robin was pleasantly surprised to find a tall, fair and friendly young man, who pulled out her chair and took her order of a coffee with careful attention.

They got down to business almost immediately. Tom was engaging, eager to please, and keen to listen to her ideas about how to approach his cousin to get the necessary confirmation of wrongdoing. They talked the job through in an increasingly positive atmosphere as he gave her details of his situation and deferred to her suggestions. She found herself looking forward to the challenge of next week’s impersonation despite her present lack of sleep.

It was Strike’s attitude that was the problem. She saw his brows knitting together in a way which made her suspect he was not entirely convinced by Tom’s charm, and he said almost nothing during the meeting. As they walked away from the hotel afterwards, Robin was baffled to find that his scowl had only increased.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. Strike just shook his head, and lit up a cigarette.

Robin persevered, irritated. ‘He wasn’t that boring. I thought he seemed sweet, actually.’

Rather than answering her, he took a deep drag and looked across the road to the Martyrs’ Memorial. They had stopped, and were standing in the middle of the pavement, parting the current of the crowd.

‘Strike?’ she prompted him.

‘Nothing wrong,’ Strike said, after another drag. Then a pause. ‘You liked him then? No problem being his girlfriend for a week?’. He saw her face suddenly tense.

‘No problem _pretending_ to be his girlfriend for a week, no,’ Robin batted back with emphasis.

She was annoyed, more than annoyed. This whole strategy had been his idea, and now he was giving her grief for running with it. He had cut short her holiday, and made her get up early and drive to this place about which she felt so ambivalent, and now he was questioning her professionalism. God forbid she should be nice to a client.

She started moving again, fast, as if she wanted to leave him behind, but he followed her. Down Broad Street they walked in awkward procession, Robin building up speed, Strike a few uneven steps behind her as they passed Blackwell’s and the Sheldonian, and went right into Catte Street. The pale gold stone of the walls and turrets around them was ornately carved and crenellated, punctuated by ancient wooden doors in arches and black ironwork fences against which ungainly bicycles sprawled. Turning into New College Lane, they saw ahead the classical proportions of the Bridge of Sighs spanning the buildings on either side, its arched windows gleaming in the sunlight.

It became clear to him both that she was not certain where she was going and that she was not going to stop. He caught her up, a little breathless, and with a large hand on her shoulder turned her gently to face him. She looked tired, and angry.

‘Sorry’, he said, trying to smile, trying to win a responsive smile from her. ‘I had a bad night. Didn’t sleep well.’ It was her turn to say nothing.

‘Look,’ he added, ‘I thought this would just be a quick trip in and out, but the weather’s… it’s sunny. It’s…’ he waved an arm around to indicate the lacy towers, the dome of the Radcliffe Camera. ‘It’s… pretty. Let’s get a drink, sit outside somewhere.’

Robin became aware that overhead was one of those cerulean blue spring skies that give a plausible pretence of summer. Distracted by Strike’s mood and her fury with him, she had not noticed that it had turned warm, even hot.

She said suddenly, surprising herself, ‘I want to go to the river. See if the punts are out.’

Strike looked at her. ‘Alright,’ he said, somewhat taken aback. ‘Let’s go to the river.’

They continued at a less breathless pace down the narrow lane, past the back of New College, before coming out onto the High Street. Robin thought she knew where she was, and turned instinctively left. In a few minutes they came to Magdalen Bridge, its broad stone arches spanning the Cherwell. Cars and buses roared over it past the cyclists, and the broad pavements were populated with tourists, but on either side they could see green meadows and playing grounds, and the khaki-coloured river passing through tall trees and running beneath the road. Tethered to the riverbank were wooden punts, lying long and flat and still in the water; a few were being manoeuvred slowly and erratically down the river.

For some minutes they stood there, leaning on the stone balustrade, watching the boats move back and forward below, the traffic noisy at their backs. Gradually Strike became aware that he was both hungry and thirsty, and that the brisk walk over hard and cobbled pavements had done his leg no favours. Worse, there was no pub in sight. He turned his head to look at Robin. Her eyes were fixed unseeingly on the water, and he sensed that his need for food and beer was not first in her mind. Much as he needed a drink, he decided to tread carefully. Whatever she was thinking about probably needed an indirect approach to unravel.

‘You ever been?’ he asked her, gesturing at the river.

‘Punting?’ She looked up at him as if she had only just remembered he was there.

‘Yeah.’

‘I have. You?’

‘I did it a few times when I was here. Harder than it looks.’ Below they could see one punt heading in slow motion towards the side of another, a crash inevitable despite the frantic efforts of both boats to move out of the way. The anxious passengers were shouting instructions to the young man wielding the pole, who was verging on panic. The boats bumped together with a dull thud, and slid off again in opposite directions.

Robin gave a slight twitch of her head, as if she were swiping left on a problem. ‘Do you want to go punting now?’ she asked, her blue-grey eyes directed straight at his.

Strike was disconcerted. He hesitated. ‘Robin, I don’t think I can…’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she interrupted. ‘ _You_ can’t punt. You have to be able to use both legs to push off and to balance.’ She paused. ‘I can punt. I’ll do it.’

‘You can punt? When did you…where…? What the fuck, Robin?’. Strike was thrown by her casual certainty.

Robin had the ghost of a smile on her face. ‘We’re wasting time,’ she said, her usual brisk competence returning. ‘There’s a supermarket on the other side of the bridge. If you go and pick us up some lunch, I’ll go down and get in the queue for a punt. Make sure you get me something decent to drink.’

Strike looked at her for a moment, still surprised, and then mentally shrugged. If she wanted to go out on the river, he would do it. He felt he owed her something for his surliness at the hotel. There was no urgent business waiting in London, and he no longer felt desperate to leave the city behind him. On consideration, there were definitely worse ways to spend an unexpectedly sunny lunchtime in Oxford than in a punt on the river with his partner.

Twenty minutes later, they reached the front of the queue, and clambered onto the swaying punt with care. Pushing off into the middle of the river channel, Strike could see that Robin had not made an empty boast. She punted in the same way she drove, confidently and dextrously, steering them under the bridge and off towards Christ Church Meadows. He sat at the front of the boat facing backwards towards Robin, watching her drop the heavy wooden pole into the dark green water, and lift it up again, hand over hand, water dripping onto her side, propelling them steadily past the Botanic Gardens. She was not fast, but she was graceful and strong, and he enjoyed looking at her slim body driving the punt forward with her characteristic determination.

He leaned back, and watched the river as it came from behind him, carrying boats and waterfowl in a sinuous stream. Its green banks shrank slowly away behind Robin. Her face was serious, as she concentrated on the sliding rhythm of the pole, but he could see her pleasure at being out on the water. The sun was warm on his face, and as the noise of the traffic on the bridge faded away, he could hear the slap of the water on the sides of the boat. He stretched, and yawned, and suddenly felt at ease for the first time since he had arrived in Oxford.


	3. Chapter 3

_That from which you recoil  
But which still makes your eyes moist_

‘So, Ellacott, mistress of the bloody surprising, how the hell did you learn to punt?’

They had put in along the right bank of the Cherwell on the other side of the bridge, in a quiet spot where few punts ventured, and Strike had taken sandwiches and chocolate from a Sainsbury’s bag. They were now sitting opposite each other, reclining against the backrests and finishing off their drinks – Doom Bar for Strike, and, of all things, a couple of cans of ready-mixed Pimm’s for Robin. Although she had scoffed when he produced them, there was now almost none left. Punting was always more of a workout than she remembered.

She looked at Strike now. He was leaning back with his arm resting on the top of the seat, solid and calm, shirt stretched tight over the curve of his belly and dark hair showing at the top of the buttons. His expression was quizzical, and, she thought, a little impressed.

‘It’s not a great mystery,’ she said. ‘I have an aunt, who used to live here until she retired, and they had a garden that went down to the river, and a little punt moored at the end of it. We used to come here most summer holidays, and go up and down the Isis, which has got a better bottom than the Cherwell.’

Strike raised an eyebrow at ‘better bottom’, and she rolled her eyes, in mock irritation at the innuendo.

‘The Isis is better for punting than the Cherwell because the bottom of the river is stonier and not as sticky,’ she enunciated, as to an idiot. ‘Anyway, I loved it, and whenever I could get the pole off my brothers I punted as much as I could.’

‘Well, you’re bloody brilliant at it. I never got the hang of it properly, even with two legs.’

Robin blushed. As ever, his admiration of the smallest things mollified and pleased her, even as she chastised herself for wanting his approval.

‘Yes, well, it’s not a life skill which has come in handy very often,’ she said.

‘So you didn’t put it on your CV when you were applying for jobs, then? Can type 90 words a minute, punts like a demon.’

‘Didn’t you notice it on there when I applied to the agency? Along with my advanced certificate in disguises and experience in rationing biscuits?’

‘Can’t say I did. But I’m sure it will be useful if we ever need to chase a suspect who’s escaping along a shallow river with a good bottom.’

She smiled despite herself, and drained the last of her drink.

‘D’you mind if I smoke?’ he asked her, already patting his trouser pockets.

‘Go ahead,’ she said, closing her eyes. The early start, the warmth of the day, the exercise, and the Pimm’s: all were making her head heavy and her muscles loose. She lay back on her folded coat, and exhaled deeply.

Strike watched the sunlight filter through the leaves overhead, and flicker on the surface of the water. Near the bank on the other side was a paddle of primrose ducklings, darting around their mother, and a pair of swans making stately progress along the river. The punt shifted slightly in the water, and he looked down to see his cigarette lying still unlit in his hand. He put it back in the packet, enjoying instead all around him the fresh scent of new growth, and the promise of summer fullness.

‘Good to get out of London now and again,’ he said, thinking of roadworks, and traffic, and his cramped flat. When Robin gave no answer, he looked over at her. She was asleep, body half-curled, hands clasped loosely under her chin and golden hair spread over her dark coat.

It was rare that Strike had the opportunity to look at Robin unobserved and he gazed at her now, seeing the sprawl of the long legs, the curve of her hips and shoulder, the line of neck and jaw. Her pretty mouth was slightly open, and her darkened eyelashes rested gently on pale cheeks. She seemed younger and more vulnerable. He felt waves of both pleasure and protectiveness arise within him as he watched her.

He had always found her physically attractive, but now he thought to himself how much he enjoyed her for just being her. Over these last years he had come to know Robin as kind, thoughtful, curious, loyal and funny. Everyone who knew her liked her, but he understood that he had been the particular beneficiary of these qualities.

Strike thought again of his sleepless night, charged with memories; of turning back and forth in the uncomfortable hotel bed. He had long since rejected the idea that he and Charlotte might have any sort of future together; on that he had firmly, and without regret, closed the door. It was the past that haunted his imagination, that made her alluring, vicious, mendacious voice reverberate inside his head.

He did not doubt that Charlotte had loved him as well as she was able. Yet her desire for him had been matched only by her inability to accept who and what he was. She had admired his strength and his independence, and berated him every time he had exercised them. She had demanded from him what he did not have, and gave only what cost her little. Even as Charlotte had craved him, she had been content to lie to him and hang him out to dry whenever it suited her. It was only now that he understood how her cruelty had spoken to his sense of being an accident, of existing only as the unintended consequence of a moment of lust. The way she had treated him had only confirmed his subconscious fear that he was not wanted and he did not matter.

Whereas Robin… Robin was committed not just to the agency they had created together, but to him, to Cormoran Strike. He knew she would never let him down. She was his sounding board, his honest critic, his drinking partner, his best mate. He never saw her without being warmed by her attention; she made him feel significant, admired, truly seen. She was not afraid to call him out, and yet she allowed him to keep his own counsel. She had left undisturbed his carapace of independence but had instead provided an atmosphere of steady care that made him feel as if he might one day begin to shed it. In the gentlest of ways, Robin had begun to force him outside his defences, and she showed a consideration and a commitment to his best interests that was a balm to a man who had always had to fend for himself. He knew she had become necessary both to his vocation and to his overall peace of mind.

This - his mind recoiled from the word ‘love’ even while tacitly acknowledging its truthfulness - was far, far more perilous than mere physical desire. She was the woman who now loomed largest in his life, and he enjoyed more than he could acknowledge the fact that, at this moment, he seemed to be the most significant man in hers. The thought that one day Robin might be attracted to, might date, might marry someone – worse, someone like Tom Reed-Smith – made him feel slightly sick.

And that, of course, was at the root of his bad temper this morning. The client’s admiration of his partner, and Robin’s polite warmth in return, had reminded him that the closeness of their own working relationship and of their deep friendship (the latter becoming to him by the day more valuable and necessary) could be shipwrecked at any moment by the appearance of a suitor.

It hadn’t helped that in externals Reed-Smith had been Matthew’s doppelgänger; handsome enough, well-paid and with the accoutrements of a comfortable existence, he was of a type found in offices all over London. Despite these marks against him Strike was forced to admit to himself that Tom seemed, admittedly after short acquaintance, to be a decent enough bloke, and that to his knowledge the sum total of their client’s crimes was to lead a conventional life and to find Robin attractive. This was hardly villainous.

Coming back to Oxford had agitated his mind like a shaken snow globe. As the flakes settled, he could see that he had chosen to be with Charlotte at an age when he had hardly known himself. Over many years he had watched her perform her high-stakes drama, recoiling from it before going back for more. On the day Charlotte had left Denmark Street in violence and fury, he knew this was love - pain and grief sought, accepted, endured - and he had rejected it for the last time.

It was at that very moment that Robin had entered his life and prosaically provided tea and biscuits with the tactful kindness and efficiency that he was to discover marked all her actions. No two women could have been more different. He asked himself now if he would have looked twice at Robin if she had been at the party the night he met Charlotte. Younger Strike would certainly have passed right over her: pretty enough, but insipid, safe, uninteresting to the boy who looked for chaos because that was what he knew. But now his adult self could see her real value. He knew she was intelligent, brave and kind – and watching her sleep at this moment she seemed to his eyes to be more lovely than on the day he met her.

Shouts and then an almighty splash interrupted his reverie. He whipped his head round to see two punts full of youths, jeering and laughing. There was a pole stuck upright in the middle of the river, with a driverless boat drifting away from it, and a dark head popping up from under the water, shocked at the betrayal. The ripples from the unexpected immersion had started their own boat swaying slightly, and he turned back smiling to see Robin sitting up and rubbing her eyes with, he thought, a little embarrassment.

‘Enjoy your nap?’ he asked her, finally getting around to lighting his cigarette.

‘God, I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘It was a very early start this morning.’ She yawned and recovered herself. ‘And you made me drink Pimm’s, which everyone knows goes down far too easily.’

‘Alcopops for grown-ups, I always think Pimm’s is,’ he said lightly. He pulled on his cigarette. ‘Want some water?’ he asked.

‘Thanks. Can’t believe how hot it’s got.’ Robin reached for the bottle he passed her and took a long swig. She said, eyes on the daffodils on the opposite bank, ‘Today has not turned out at all as I expected.’

Strike looked at her, conscious of her deeper meaning. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply.

Robin had not quite expected this. ‘What for?’ she asked, cautiously.

‘For being a dick this morning.’

‘That’s ok,’ she said, after a moment, looking down at her denim-clad legs resting on the dark blue canvas cushion and the wooden bottom of the punt. She would have given good money to know why he had behaved like that, but she did not, in truth, expect him to elaborate. Strike was, like many men, not one for post-mortem analysis of anything more than a football match.

Strike wanted with every ounce of him to leave it there, but he knew that she deserved more. Honest or screwed, honest or screwed, he told himself.

‘You are always professional, Robin, and I shouldn’t have cast doubts on that,’ he said. ‘It’s just…’

She lifted her head up to face him. ‘Just what?’

‘It’s just that he obviously fancied you. And you were really good with him – completely professional, as I said,’ he added hurriedly, ‘but it made me think that maybe…it seemed so easy between the two of you… I thought I could see you both…’ His voice trailed off, and he took another drag on his cigarette.

There was a long silence. Strike could hear distant voices, and beyond them, the hum of the city.

‘Cormoran,’ Robin said, at last. ‘What is it that you think I want?’

He tapped the ash of the cigarette into the water beside him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I guess…’ He was quiet for a moment. ‘I guess I assume deep down that, as committed as I know you are to the agency, one day there’ll be some man who will want you to marry him, and that will be the end.’

‘The end of the agency?’

‘The agency as it is, certainly. But also, our…,’ he stumbled for the word, ‘our…relationship.’

Eyes fixed on the side of the punt, Robin tried to take all this in.

He thought she would exchange work for marriage, not immediately, but inevitably. He was afraid that she would end up with Tom, or the girlfriend or wife of someone like him, for real. The fact that he was disturbed by that prospect set her heart beating faster. Was he declaring that between them lay something more than partnership, something deeper than friendship? Her consciousness seemed to have become all one exposed nerve-centre, sensitive to the slightest breath of innuendo.

If he could think that she would so easily relinquish her work for a man, he must have no idea of how deeply he had changed her ambitions, her desires, and indeed her life. He had affirmed her talent and given her the chance to do a job she loved. He had allowed her, albeit reluctantly at times, to take risks. All that had made her into a person Matthew could not recognise, and had spoken to her sense of vocation in a way that only Strike himself could understand. The way he had treated her as an equal, his kindness when she had struggled, his respectful physical distance: in all these ways she had never been taken seriously before, and this had become precious to her. She admired him and she cared for him. Whether or not she could bring herself to use the word ‘love’ for how she felt about him (and it fitted better than any other, she suddenly realised), she knew without a doubt that he had spoiled her for a relationship with any other man.

She looked up, straight into his questioning eyes fixed on her from the other end of the punt.

‘Did I ever tell you that I applied to Oxford University?’ she said.


	4. Chapter 4

_Let us do what you fear most_

Strike’s eyebrows shot up in astonishment. Robin looked a little disconcerted at his expression, and he was suddenly keen that she not take his surprise the wrong way.

‘It’s not that I don’t think you are clever enough to go to Oxford, because you obviously are,’ he said quickly, ‘but just that you never mentioned it.’

‘It’s not something I wanted to think about, really. Coming here today has brought it all back…’ she said, with a hint of wistfulness.

‘I take it you didn’t get in?’ he asked, kindly.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t get in.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I didn’t get in, which is fine. It really is. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to study here, in some ways, but I thought I’d give it a go. I loved coming to Oxford on holiday, and the course looked good, and my school encouraged me to apply.’

She could see Strike listening, waiting. It felt at the same time both absurd and completely reasonable that she had never told him all this before.

‘The thing I’m not fine about…at least, I was ok with it for a long time, but then, after the divorce, I thought about it again…. It was how Matthew was about it, what he did.’

The sudden stillness about Strike’s face reminded her how little he had liked her ex-husband.

‘So, you know Matt and I got together in the sixth form? In the summer, before we had to put in our uni applications in the autumn. He seemed alright about me applying to Oxford…’ She stopped, obviously struck by a thought.

‘What?’ prompted Strike.

‘I hadn’t thought of this until just now, but why was I even concerned about what he thought about it? Why…?’ She shook her head at her former self.

‘Anyway, he was ok, although he was always pushing me to come out with him and his friends, and I had lots of preparation to do for the interview. And then…’

Strike could see her blush slightly, as she took another deep breath. ‘He wanted us to sleep together, and don’t get me wrong, I wanted to as well, but it was just all a bit overwhelming, because I hadn’t…well, he hadn’t either…and I just wanted to wait a little bit, until after the interview…’ She looked over at him, and she could see he understood.

‘Well, we did…do it then, as he wanted, and it was fine. It wasn’t like I didn’t want to, I just…. It was all great,’ she continued, firmly. ‘It’s just that it was the week before the interview, and I was, you know, all… loved up, and so actually quite distracted, and I didn’t get all the reading done that I should have. I got on the train to come here, and went to the college, and they showed me my room, and there were some other people applying who seemed really nice. We were all going to spend some of the evening together, and I was looking forward to it. I was nervous, but I was alright.

‘I had just got my first mobile phone as a present for my eighteenth, and as I was getting ready to meet the others, Matt called me. He faffed around for a bit, and then he said he was having second thoughts about us…being together, and he thought we needed to talk.’

Strike’s eyes widened slightly, but he said nothing.

‘So, we talked and talked but he couldn’t really tell me what was wrong, and I was distraught, obviously, and eventually it was so late…. Anyway, I hardly slept that night, and the next day I didn’t have my interview until the afternoon, so I had lots of time to worry about that, but mostly I was worrying about Matt. And then - it was such a stupid thing – I went for a walk to look at Oxford and distract myself, and it was so cold and wet, and I had new shoes on which gave me these awful blisters, and I was in agony by the time I got back. And I hadn’t brought another pair of shoes so by the time I went in to the interview, I could hardly walk, and I was so tired, and upset…’

Robin looked out over the water. It was warm and green and peaceful, and so very far away from that bleak and miserable December day more than a decade ago. But just for a second she was back in the book-lined study, exhausted and terrified, sitting on an uncomfortable armchair, and unable to answer a single question that the kindly tutors were asking her.

‘As you can imagine,’ she went on, ‘I completely tanked. I could hardly get a sentence out. They were sweet about it, but they let me go without doing interviews at any other colleges, and I limped to the train station and went home. And Matt was so nice, and said he was sorry if he had upset me, and that he did want us to be together – and I just wanted it all behind me. I was just grateful that we were getting back together.’

As if anticipating his response, she said hurriedly, ‘Obviously, now, I can see what he was doing. He was sabotaging my chances. He turned all my attention on him by pushing us to sleep together and then blew hot and cold so I couldn’t think straight.’

She remembered Matt’s comforting hug when she opened her letter of rejection. ‘I’m not even sure it was deliberate. Perhaps it was just pure instinct, to want to stop something that might take me away from him, might set me off in a different direction. Of course, when I’m feeling angry about things, I think it was because he couldn’t handle me doing better than him.’

She paused, and turned back to look at Strike again. ‘It isn’t that going to Oxford was the be all and end all for me. In many ways I didn’t actually care that much. It’s more that I can see now that what I wanted was not as important to Matt as what he wanted.’

She couldn’t read his expression any more. Did he despise her for being so weak, so easily duped and diverted from what mattered to her?

‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I know that I probably wouldn’t have got in to Oxford anyway, and I was very happy with my second choice of uni…well, at least, until…’

Her voice trailed off, and Strike could see the memory of her attacker start to fill her eyes with tears. He knew what she was thinking: if she had held it together at the Oxford interview and got a place, if she had not gone to that other university as her second choice, if she had seen the warning on the local news, if she had not been out at just that time….

Too late, Strike remembered that while punts are extremely difficult to capsize, falling out of them is lamentably simple. As he tried to stand up to go and comfort a distressed Robin, the sudden movement made the boat rock violently, and for a moment he was certain he was going over the side into the water. He swore as he felt the boat tilt, and himself start to topple. Just in time he shifted his weight back, and sank gingerly into his seat, cursing his uncooperative leg and the inability of punts to allow safe passage from one end to another in a hurry.

Robin seemed tearful despite the slapstick of his near miss. She was wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, her face disconsolate. ‘C’mere,’ he said gruffly. ‘I can’t move around in this bloody boat, so you are going to have to come and sit beside me at my end.’

He waved her towards him with an outstretched arm, and she half-crawled along the punt, and awkwardly arranged herself next to him. She felt his arm go around her, and pull her into his side. He was large and warm, and his shirt smelled of cigarettes and laundry detergent. She leaned her head against his shoulder and pressed against him as if he were a bulwark against dark reminders threatened to overwhelm her.

As he had listened to her story, Strike had been filled with a tight-jawed anger: at Matthew for his unkindness and selfishness, and – he knew unjustly – at Robin, for letting him get away with it. Even from the very beginning, that twat had manipulated her, had tried to hold her back, had wanted to make her a supporting part in the drama starring Matthew Cunliffe, and she had not seen it happening.

Now Strike pulled himself up. None of this was Robin’s fault: of course it wasn’t, just as it was not her fault that she had been attacked. Didn’t he know as well as anyone that eighteen-year-olds don’t have the life experience to spot the sort of flaws that mark a relationship as heading for disaster from its very inception? Neither he nor Robin could have anticipated the toxic confluence of personality and circumstance that would poison their first adult experiences of wanting and loving.

They sat there, side by side, neither moving nor speaking, for some time. Resting his face against her hair, Strike could smell her shampoo; his skin was warmed by her breath through his thin shirt and he could feel his chest bound by her arm where she had wrapped it round him. The last time they had held each other like this was the hug on the stairs at her wedding, and he felt again as he had then, that he was doing at last what he had missed for so long.

I’m sorry,’ she said, at last, still tucked against him. ‘I didn’t mean to tell you everything quite like that. It’s just…’

She started again. ‘Since the divorce, I’ve been looking back on all those years I spent with Matt. He wanted me to want the same things as him, which I guess I did, mostly. But I never understood how far he was prepared to go to manipulate me into them.’ There was a trace of fierceness in her voice. ‘If I’m ever with anyone again, it will have to be someone who takes what I want seriously. I mean, I hope we would want the same things out of life, more or less, but what I do…who I am now…that’s not up for grabs. Whoever it is…if there is someone…he will have to understand that.’

He thought he felt her smile slightly. ‘He seemed nice enough, but I really don’t think that person is going to be Tom Reed-Smith, if I’m honest,’ she said, a glimmer of humour in her voice.

‘He’s not in the running then? Not even the top three?’ Strike asked, in an attempt at lightness. She could hear the rumble of his voice in his chest through the ear she had laid against him.

She wondered how to answer, wondered if she were brave enough to give herself away still further. She kept her head pressed against his shoulder to avoid seeing his face as she spoke.

‘There’s no one in the running, Cormoran. For me… I don’t…right now, you’re the one who understands what I do, and who…who takes me seriously. No one else does that, not really. Maybe I might meet someone one day but…’

She braced herself to say the words out loud. ‘I don’t think there is room in my life for anyone else, not while you’re around…’ She felt him go still beside her, and terrified, she retreated a little. ‘Not while we’re best mates,’ she added quickly.

He could hear the tremble in her voice, and felt hardly less afraid himself. All the emotions of the last twenty-four hours were surging in his chest: the melancholy of returning to this place where he had once been happy, the bitter recollection of his relationship with Charlotte, his foolish jealousy of their client.

But also, his tender concern for Robin as she relived Matthew’s betrayal, his delight and contentment at holding her tight within his arms, the joy that leapt in him as he began to understand just a little of what he was to her. This felt like something that might anchor rather than weigh down, secure rather than confine or imprison. This felt like permanence.

‘Is that all we are?’ he asked softly, into her hair. ‘Best mates?’ He felt her tense inside his clasp. ‘Because, after coming back here, to Oxford, I’m not sure ‘best mates’ is what I want anymore.’

Robin was utterly motionless, breathless, dumbstruck at what she had just heard.

He spoke in a low, resonant voice. ‘I spent last night thinking about the past, about all my memories of being here. Especially… in particular… being with Charlotte. There were good times, but also…bad ones. I’ll never be able to forget them, I don’t think. But I feel like one day soon I’ll get to a point where I might be glad to remember some of it.’

She felt him breathe out in a sigh and slacken his hold on her a little. He put a finger under her chin and gently raising her face to his, looked directly into her wide, anxious eyes.

He said slowly, ‘Robin, when I made those choices…well, I was a lot younger then. I think I get a bit better now why I chose…you need to know - I’ll tell you one day soon - about all that. But I want you to understand - I wouldn’t make the same choices now.’

His hand smoothed her hair; his thumb ran along the soft skin of her cheek. ‘These last few years, knowing you - you’ve made everything different.’

The look on her face, full of hope and fear, made his breath catch and his heart twist within him.

_All or nothing. See what happens._

He shook his head slightly, almost incredulously, as if he couldn’t believe the man he had been, nor yet what he was about to say.

‘Robin, if I could go back to my twenties now…God, I wouldn’t want the same things as I did back then. I think what I would want…what I do want right now…is you.’


	5. Chapter 5

_In some kinds of love  
The possibilities are endless_

The man at the punt hire stand looked at his watch in the dimming light. ‘You’ve just made it back in time. We were about to put the cost of a lost punt on your credit card. Or send a search party, make sure you hadn’t drowned or been eaten by swans.’

The pretty redhead blushed. He said, ‘That’ll be… six and a half… let’s say six hours. Actually, it’s going to be cheaper just to charge you 100 quid for the whole day.’

Her companion, large and impassive, silently handed over a card.

‘Beautiful day, though,’ he continued. ‘Getting a little chilly now, but felt like summer, earlier. Good day to be out on the river.’

The woman smiled at him, a little tremulously. ‘It has been lovely,’ she said, with warmth in her voice. ‘A perfect day.’

He watched the couple go. As they reached the top of the incline back to the High Street, he saw the man lift her hand, and press it to his mouth. Then, entwining it tight in his, they set off together into the dusk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies if this chapter leaps over some stuff you would have liked to see. It is in keeping with the Golden Age detective novel I’m riffing off in this fic, but I hope it is not disappointing. I do have an idea for an epilogue but I’m not sure if it will work yet, so chapter 5 is the end for now.
> 
> I’m so grateful to everyone for their enthusiasm and encouraging comments, and want to give special thanks to FallingFaintly for all the enormously insightful thoughts she’s shared in conversation over these last months. 
> 
> All hail JKR (my fellow Oxford reject*), DLS (reading whom makes every teenage girl want to apply to Oxford), and the Velvet Underground, with fervent apologies to all three for such thievery of their lines that I hardly know anymore what is theirs and what is mine.
> 
> *I like to think that JKR and Robin and I have gone on to greater things


End file.
